Meet the Track Chairs: Lars George of the Integrating Hadoop Track

Posted February 15, 2013

Today’s interview features Lars George, chair of the Integrating Hadoop track. Lars is the Director EMEA Services for Cloudera, where he manages the team of pre- and post-sales services staff at Cloudera EMEA.

Tell us about the Integrating Hadoop track.

An essential task introducing Apache Hadoop to any organization is to make it fit into some kind of existing IT infrastructure. The “Integrating Hadoop” track has a selection across various disciplines regarding this effort.

Who else was involved in the selection process for your track?

I had help from Bernd Fondermann (Germany) and Mathias Herberts (France), both long-standing members of the Hadoop ecosystem and, in their own right, contributors to the overall cause. Bernd has written countless articles and is a published author on Hadoop. Like Bernd, Mathias has been a community member for years and helped to drive important decisions by participating openly and collaboratively on the Hadoop mailing lists and IRC.

What was the hardest part about the selection process?

The hardest part was condensing the 60+ submissions down to what could be fit into the schedule. We could have easily filled a weeklong track with the high quality talks that were proposed. I apologize to everyone that was not selected – but we could only select a handful from so many interesting submissions.

What takeaways do you expect for folks attending sessions in your track?

We selected the talks from a variety of angles including user stories, general overviews, and a few others. I think we will be successful in giving attendees a good head start into the task of integrating Hadoop. You will hear how different organizations have tackled this topic, and receive a well-rounded, coherent view on the topic.

What are you personally most looking forward to at Hadoop Summit Europe?

Seeing how Europe is taking on Hadoop, and with it the new kind of challenges. Having worked with Hadoop – and especially HBase – since 2007, it is like a flower starting to come into full bloom. I would love to chat with everyone attending about their needs, hopes, and troubles, as this is a defining moment in Hadoop and open-source in general. Exciting times!

If you could attend one session from another track, which session would it be?

I am quite interested in all of the Machine Learning talks. This is an interesting track and topic because it’s the next step for organizations. Once they have installed and integrated Hadoop, they will want to gain more insight into their data. This is how math should be in school, applicable and reflected in real life.

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